Here we enter
into the most difficult phase of promoting your website:
there is very little consistency; methods change rapidly
and frequently; ranking criteria are different from one
engine to the next.
In the Net's
infancy, you used to be able to register with the few
search engines in existence and almost be guaranteed a top
spot if you worked at it just a little bit. Now there are
literally thousands of search engines and directories, and
it would be impossible to submit your URL to them all.
Submission services make this relatively easy. Top
positioning on the handful of major engines, however,
requires a great deal of time and effort, and the shotgun
approach of a submission service will not achieve this for
you.
Nowadays, ranking
in the "first 30", i.e., the first two or three
pages that come up on a surfer's search, can be nearly
impossible, depending on the keywords you are targeting. To
complicate matters further, none of the top ten or twelve
engines or directories evaluate and list sites in the same
way, and the algorithms used also change frequently.
Meta tags
"keywords" and "description" (hidden
elements in a web page's code) are used by some search
engines to determine a site's relevancy, although less frequently now than
they used to. Others employ a
combination of meta tags and actual page content, page
content only, or the first 200 characters after the
<body> tag. Some penalize for keyword repetition,
others expect it. Some don't accept automatic submissions
or will lower the position. Some don't reveal how they rank
pages, and with the recent invention of keyword bidding on
some sites as well as pay-per-click "ranking", companies with large advertising budgets will
always come up at the top because they can afford to pay
for those slots, and small businesses are left behind.
There are three
basic ways of getting listed:
Manual
submission. You visit each search engine and follow
their "submit URL" procedure. This costs you
only time, although plenty of it. Be sure to read each
engine's instructions and help files; you may not get a
chance to make changes or correct mistakes.
Automatic
submission. Many such services exist; a few are free
for a limited number of search engines, while most charge
a fee and submit to many sites. However, the big search engines now frown on the practice and may flag you as a spammer. Moreover, submission services brag about the number of search engines they submit to, but many of those are link farms, porn sites, etc. Probably not the kind of company you'd want to keep.
Professional
submission services. These generally help you refine
your keywords, submit your site and/or specific pages to
the major search engines and monitor your ranking,
continuously refining and resubmitting your pages to the
major engines. As this process is time-consuming, these
services cost from a few hundred to several thousand
dollars. However, high ranking can significantly increase
your site's commercial success. We will gladly discuss
this process with you; you'll find our fees quite
reasonable.
Do-it-yourselfers
with enough time on their hands have another option that
gives similar results as a professional service, at a lower
cost. Positioning software that helps you to develop your pages and submit
them, is now available. Both WebPosition
and Search Engine Commando are highly rated and offer free trial
versions. So compare and decide which works best for you.
The main points
to remember here: a site's success is no more automatic
than a retail store's. Ongoing targeted marketing and
promotion is everything. Without it, a few people will
still find you, just like they might happen to pass by your
store, but success is almost impossible to build on the
impulse purchases of a few passersby.
For information about more marketing techniques, please also refer to Dr Wilson's article
on Viral Marketing Principles.
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